Third Street, McMinnville's Victorian Downtown
Near Mcminnville, Oregon
Third Street is the beating heart of McMinnville, and the blocks you are walking form the McMinnville Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty seven. What makes this street unusual is how completely it survived. Most of these buildings went up between eighteen eighty five and nineteen twelve, during the boom that followed the railroad's arrival, when the town's merchants tore down their wooden storefronts and rebuilt in brick and cast iron.
Look up above the modern shop windows and you will see the original nineteenth century facades, with their corbelled cornices, tall segmental arched windows, and the ornamental brickwork of the Italianate and Queen Anne styles. Some of the earliest brick buildings on the street still stand. These buildings once housed banks, hotels, a hardware trade, and mills serving the wheat farmers of the surrounding valley.
Because McMinnville largely escaped the fires and aggressive urban renewal that erased so many old main streets, Third Street today feels like a nearly intact Victorian era commercial district, which is exactly why it draws visitors from around the world.
